NEW YORK – Art at the Institute is presenting “Peripheral Visions,” an exhibition of mixed-media artworks by familial artists Iranaeus and Dorian Yurchuk, exploring extreme visions of architectonic and topographic ruminations in two and three dimensions.
The exhibition opens at the Ukrainian Institute of America on Friday, February 21, with an opening reception for the artists at 6-8 p.m. Curated by Walter Hoydysh, Ph.D., director of Art at the Institute, this marks the artists’ first showing with the UIA.
Both father and son independently traverse the field with inquiries of the realm between painting and sculpture, and between photography, painting and architecture. Each has cultivated a distinct and rich theatrical interspace, where mediums feed into each other. It is also conceivable to say that for the Yurchuks, the interspace offers organic and some-time occupied spaces, ones of transition, detention and arrest; hence it is potentially also, at a side glance, one of no return – in this way it is like the incidental for which the exhibition is named. As an aesthetic zone, though – and this is what the artists wish for prospective visitors to learn from wandering through the exhibition – the interspace is where space, emotion, energy and natural forces are conjured and released.
Irenaeus Yurchuk has crafted and laid claim to an interval for himself on a difficult and historic playing field. His highly inventive designs liberate architecture from its traditional treatment of stone and metal, and introduce a radical new way to envision space in synchronicity with its surroundings. The dense matrix that occupies his paintings appears both constructed and organic. Like the cultural and historical architecture they evoke, these vague photomechanical records have grown from some originating seed into a pulsating mass whose boundaries are indeterminate and fluctuating. While his approach is characterized by a modernist recombination of photographic fragments into wholly abstract combinations, Mr. Yurchuk augments his surfaces with chromatic paint media and other materials to engineer a detailed diagrammatic figuration. The final effect proves a stunning pastiche of image, pattern, color and texture.
There is no ideal viewpoint for taking in these architectural and monumental redefinitions, which plays with opacity, transparency and perspectives opened by “seeing through,” between stoppage and motion. Instead of the fixed viewpoint, Mr. Yurchuk opens the playing field to an infinite number of vantage points from which the viewer will take in this total experience.
Irenaeus Yurchuk’s “Drohobych Church” (2019, mixed media on canvas).
In contrast to his father, Dorian Yurchuk develops rituals of his own, creating objects, reliefs and illustrations that operate between painting and sculpture, and further establish new realms for visual and sensory discovery. Multi-layered in their direct and indirect intents, these works are resonant with the younger Mr. Yurchuk’s occupational and perceptual past, incorporating objects and remnants from the building trade, and repurposing these elemental materials to create works imbued with a poetic spirit residing between order and chaos, creation and destruction. Autonomous from but parallel to his objects, Dorian Yurchuk’s grander two-dimensional compositions are conceived of turbulent renderings by an inveterate outdoorsman responding to topographies from above and below, both real and imagined. Abstracting these encounters into idiosyncratic forms and intense colors, these illustrations and paintings capture his sense of wonder with the ebb and flow of the natural world.
Ultimately, and significantly with this exhibition, Iranaeus and Dorian Yurchuk foreshadow the interspace: the space between, a crossing of borders where everything changes and a newfound sensibility and perception of one’s surroundings arises. The interspace is a space of breeding, of possibility, of transition, of temporal suspension that is brought to certain eruption. It is an interim where things lay undressed, a space of impression where one is neither out nor in, but between. They believe that their purpose is to transform the experience of material observation into artwork – like energy, never destroyed or created, only changing its forms.
Born in Ukraine during the second world war, Iranaeus Yurchuk grew up in central New York state. He earned an architectural degree from The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture as well as a graduate degree in urban design and planning from Columbia University. He worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art full-time. His creative work includes drawing, painting, graphic design, photography and film-making. He has participated in group exhibitions in North America and Europe, including a recent solo show at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Gallery in upstate New York. His artworks are held in private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Dorian Yurchuk studied architecture at The Cooper Union and McGill University, and practices in the area of historic restoration and preservation. His paintings, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance and group exhibitions at Grazhda Music and Art Center of Greene County and Université du Québec à Montréal.
About Art at the Institute
Celebrating its 66th year of activity, Art at the Institute is the visual arts programming division of the Ukrainian Institute of America. Since its establishment in 1955, Art at the Institute has organized projects and exhibitions with the aim of providing post-war and contemporary Ukrainian artists a platform for their creative output, presenting it to the broader public on New York’s Museum Mile.
“Peripheral Visions” runs from February 21 to March 8 at The Ukrainian Institute of America, 2 E. 79th St. Exhibition hours are Tuesday to Sunday, noon-6 p.m., or by appointment. For further information, readers may contact Olena Sidlovych, executive director, at 212-288-8660 or [email protected].